People’s Trust: the design of a survey-based experiment

Publication type

Conference Paper

Series

Monday Afternoon Seminar Series

Authors

Publication date

June 12, 2006

Abstract:

In this paper we present the design of a two-stage experiment which aims to measure trusting and trustworthiness in a representative sample of the population. In the first part we discuss the shortcomings of the most common design of the 'trust-game' experiment in eliciting information about clear and cogent notions of trusting and trustworthiness, and in the second part we present an alternative design, which we call the 'framed binary trust game'. The basic design will be administered to a sample of 200 subjects who were formerly members of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). In the third part of the paper, we extend this design to allow the 'truster' to purchase some information about the 'trustee' so as to make the experiment a better representation of real-life trust decisions. We plan in a second stage to run the extended experiment on a larger sample of about 1000 subjects.


Related Publications

#518194

News

Latest findings, new research

Publications search

Search all research by subject and author

Podcasts

Researchers discuss their findings and what they mean for society

Projects

Background and context, methods and data, aims and outputs

Events

Conferences, seminars and workshops

Survey methodology

Specialist research, practice and study

Taking the long view

ISER's annual report

Themes

Key research themes and areas of interest